The Toronto Maple Leafs have several holes in their roster and need to make improvements before the Trade Deadline and the season's stretch run.
Improving the Toronto Maple Leafs is an extremely tall task because they lack cap space, tradable assets, and even worse, have given no-trade protection to players who in no way required it.
The Leafs Salary Cap Situation, which can be seen here on puckpedia.com, is not good. Not only is there limited space, but you can look down the list and see all the replacement players that they have overpaid: Max Domi, David Kampf, Ryan Reaves, Calle Jarnkrok, Connor Dewar, Jani Hakanpaa, Simon Benoit, Conor Timmins and Oliver Ekman Larsson.
All of these players could (should) be replaced with players making closer to the league minimum with no loss to the team's ability to compete. But what's worse, is that some of them have no-trade protection that prevents the team from easily moving them.
Baffling No-Trade Protection Hurting the Maple Leafs Trade Options
It makes sense to give no-trade protection to help convince players like Auston Matthews or John Tavares to sign here.
But Max Domi hasn't gotten a multi-year contract in years, and his statistics say he's closer to a league minimum player than a four million dollar player. The Leafs offer of almost $4 million for four years was such a drastic overpayment that there is no way Domi had better options, so why would the Leafs also give him a 13 tream no-trade clause?
It's madness.
David Kampf, the NHL's highest paid fourth liner, and a player who is apparently useless unless you pair him with Pierre Engvall, for some reason has a ten team list of teams he cannot be traded to.
The most bizarre one has to be Jani Hakanpaa who has an eight team no-trade list. Why exactly? This replacement player was signed even though he had obvious and well known knee issues. Like every other team but the Leafs assumed, he can't play in the NHL anymore. But the Leafs felt inclined to give him no-trade protection.
Less bizarre but infinitely more stupid, the Leafs signed Oliver Ekman-Larsson to a four year deal that pays nearly $4 million and has a 16 team no-trade list. OEL played last year on Florida in the same role as the Leafs used Mark Giordano. Florida paid OEL $2 million while the Leafs had Gio for the league minimum.
Why would you take a player who does what you were getting for the league minimum and pay him four times that, and then also give him no-trade protection? Keep in mind doing this also means you have to give away a first round pick you spent years developing who is a decade younger and much, much better. And this player was also bought out of his most recent big contract.
Does this make sense to anyone? The only thing that does make sense is that the Toronto Maple Leafs are considered to be one of the most poorly managed teams in the NHL.